The Reign of the Tyrant

Introduction:

The Substation II sub sandwich; it’s too much for us to eat in one sitting! So, we must take it in small bites. Even today, we will go one line at a time, because understanding the essence of this passage is critical for understanding the Gospel of God!

Essentially, Paul’s brief history of the world Lewis: “the history of man is the long tragic story of humanity trying to find something other than God to make him happy.”

The plan for today is to go line by line through this passage, a little at a time, so we can get our heads around what Paul is doing. Really, there is one point of this passage: all humanity is under the reign of sin until the work of Christ sets them free. Just for good measure we will see Paul explain a little in verses 13 and 1 4 to address what would be a common question, and is still a common question today.

1. All humanity is under the reign of sin (12)

Romans 5:12 ESV

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—

Therefore - what’s it there for? This passage is connected to everything we have already discussed in Romans, and it is helpful to understand how it fits. Paul is using this section to address what would inevitably be some serious questions in the minds of the Roman Christians:

How did this happen? How are we reconciled to God? Really, how did we get estranged in the first place, and how did reconciliation happen? Paul wants to go back and show us the whole story from God’s perspective, so that we can learn more about Him, our predicament and the God-given solution.

But there is another question that Paul is working out here, and it is one of amazement. When you think about what we have already discussed, it is unbelievable! We just finished a passage where we are told to rejoice in God through Jesus Christ, “through whom we have recieved reconciliation.” What a staggering truth: every child of God, every single Christian, has recieved reconciliation, through the work of Jesus. But How could so many owe so much to one person? How did one person save all the Christians in history?

And in response, Paul gives a brief history of the world in 25 words. So, now that we are done with the first word, let’s dig a little.

“Just as sin came into the world through one man.”

To answer how we got here, we need to go back to how it started

Genesis 1: God creates man (Adam, which means man) and declares everything good. No sin, no death, no corruption in God’s perfect world.

Genesis 2: Adam is given a garden to take care of, with this commandment: Genesis 2:16-17

Genesis 2:16–17 ESV

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Genesis 3 - Satan tempts Eve with “did God really say?” And then, the Fall: Genesis 3:6-7

Genesis 3:6–7 ESV

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

Right here, at this point, Sin “came into the world.” It was an invasion. what happened?

A quick definition of sin

the act of violating God’s law which led to guilt. So, disobedience to God has invaded.

rejecting righteousness and becoming unrighteous. So, unrighteousness has invaded.

a nature that is now bent towards rebellion, disobedience and unrighteousness. So, rebellion against God has invaded God’s creation.

Now, this is essential: Adam stood before God as the representative for all humanity. Every single human was represented in and by the sin of Adam. Now, as westerners we really struggle with this truth, because we cling to individualism very tightly.

But it is important to remember that before Adam was a name, it was a word, with a meaning, not just the name of a person. Adam is the transliteration of the Hebrew word Adam which, when not talking about the first human, is always translated “man.” So, it is important to read Genesis 3 and replace “adam” with “man,” because that’s how this text would have been read originally.

In other words, the whole way the text in Genesis 3 is set up, man is standing before God, and is representative of all humanity.

what we may be quick to say: “That’s not fair.” Just a few thoughts:

You don’t want fair. Trust me.

You and I would have done the same, if not worse.

What is the big idea? That Adam served as the representative of all humanity. He is the head of humanity, and represented each of us from that time forward. Because of this, when Adam sinned, it was as if we all sinned. We generally talk of this in terms of “original sin.”

This is essential going forward: Adam opened the door for sin, which came into the world, and is now in all humanity. But just as Adam opened the door for sin, sin opened the door for death:

“And death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.”

All human history is transformed at that point. God’s perfect world is now starting to groan under the weight of the tyrant of sin. Paul is now explaining how this is:

Remember the promise in Genesis 2? “The day you eat of it, you shall surely die.” But Adam didn’t die right away, did he? But you know what? Adam died. Sin brought death, and now sin and death are beginning their unholy reign.

Adam and Eve are cast out of the garden, and at that point, every single human ever (with just a couple of cases of divine intervention excluded) tasted death.

The two certainties of humanity: not death and taxes, sin and death.

Ask any parent about the certainty of sin. The best children are still sinners.

Ask any one who has lived for any time about death. From the time we are born, we are marching towards death. In a very real way, we can look at a newborn baby and say “they have only been alive for five minutes,” and also say “they are five minutes closer to their death.” Death is a certainty. In a recent survey, 10/10 people surveyed die.

And so, because each of us is a sinner, each of us will taste death. There is an inevitability to death that is inescapable, and that consistently stands as a reminder of our need for redemption and rescue!

Something I have heard, many times in my life, and that I have been guilty of saying from time to time is “Death is natural.” By it, we mean that it is a normal part of life and an inevitability. I understand what we mean by this, but let me just say this plainly: death is anything but natural.

Paul is showing us here that death is an unnatural tyrant. Sin invaded, like a thief or a robber, and cracked open the door for the reign of death, who then kicked down the door and usurped the throne of God in this world.

And we know, if we are honest, that death is unnatural. We feel it when someone we love dies. We experience it when a baby, or a child, or a spouse, experiences death. It doesn’t matter how long we live, in almost all cases death just feels too soon. We try to comfort one another by saying “death is just a natural part of life” but you and I know that’s no comfort.

Death is a tyrant, and it needed to be defeated.

So, here is our predicament: try though we may, we cannot hide from God. We may delay the effects of dying some, we may even see medical advances that make life longer, but we still die.

And when we die, we must meet the God we sinned against. We cannot escape this fate, there is no way!

And every single person will meet this fate. So, “all sinned” is the same exact language as 3:23 - it means all! Every single person is a sinner. Every child is born in sin. Every person in an unreached people group that has never heard the Gospel is a sinner. All of us.

This would have raised questions in the minds of both the Jew and the pagan who was listening!

The Jew: I am a child of Abraham, and so spared from the wrath of God by virtue of my birth.

The pagan: I didn’t have the law, so I’m not guilty of breaking a law I didn’t know existed!

Ah-ha! Paul says. But here is the thing:

2. No, really: All humanity is under the reign of sin (13-14)

After making such an important and powerful point, Paul knows that he will need to answer some questions, so he begins to examine some questions that he knows will come. We can generally boil this down into the answering of two questions:

- What about those who didn’t have the law, and so didn’t know what sin was? Surely they can’t be guilty.

- What about those who didn’t sin like Adam did? I mean, Adam heard directly from the voice of God! what about people who didn’t have the words of God, surely they can’t be guilty!

Let’s see how Paul handles the first one first:

What about people who didn’t have the law?

there is a logical objection that Paul wants to address here - what about the people who lived before Moses? Before Moses, there was no written law, and before there was no written law, could there have actually been sin? The Law was written as God’s revealed will; were people violating God’s will even before it was revealed?

We don’t as much ask this question as we do ask the question about the people in parts of the world where there is no access to the Gospel. I mean, how can they be help responsible if they have never heard the Gospel? Now, you may remember that we have already addressed this issue before, earlier in Romans, but Paul is going to answer it a bit more explicitly than he even did there.

For sin was indeed in the world before the law was given

The law didn’t invent sin! Before Moses had the law, people died. And these people died because of sin in the world.

This puts everyone in the same category: everyone, Jew, Greek, slave, free, black, white, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat, or none of the above: we were all represented by our Father Adam. And in being represented by our Father Adam, His sin was passed on to us, and so we are born under the curse of sin and death, and are sinners.

But wait! We didn’t know it was sin before we had the law!

Genesis 4 - Cain kills Abel; was that sin?

What about God’s estimation of humanity at the time of the flood?

Genesis 6:5 ESV

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Are these people sinners? Yes!

In fact, the whole rest of the story of Genesis could be boiled down as a study of both the effects of sin and the unfolding plan of God to take care of sin.

“But sin is not counted where there is no law.”

- wait, what? Hitting this passage feels like hitting a brick wall, because we felt like we were tracking with Paul right up until here, and now he throws this out here, and our head spins! This is a good time for a few principles on reading our Bible, and interpreting hard passages.

First, I have been encouraged this week by the words of Peter about Paul and his letters in 2 Peter 3:16 “There are some things in them that are hard to understand.” If Peter, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, could confess that Paul wasn’t always the easiest to follow, then we are all in good company here.

Second, we need to take a look at what Paul has already said in Romans 2:12

Romans 2:12 ESV

For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.

Did you see that? People “sin without the law.” A primary rule in dealing with Bible passages that are hard to understand is that we lean on the passages that are very clear in order to help us grasp some of the passages that are more difficult to understand. And we have already established in Romans 1 and 2 that:

People have and suppress the truth

That those who do not have the law still sin

That those who don’t have the law, still have the law written on their hearts, adn their consciences bear witness against them

that all, both jews and greeks, are under sin.

that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

So already knowing all this, and having a pretty clear understanding of what is being said before, Paul cannot be saying “people without the written law are not sinners.” We can rule this out, not just because of Paul, but because of the whole testimony of the Bible. In addition, this would contradict what came before, and what is coming after, as we will see in just a second.

In fact, Paul is using this to say nearly the opposite. One of the commentators I read this week put it this way: “sin must have been there, because death was there, ruling like a tyrant.” In other words, these people had the law on their hearts, they had consciences that accused them, and they still were guilty. And we know this because they all died. Death is the sign of the presence of sin.

Romans 2:12 ESV

For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.

Romans 2:14–15 ESV

For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them

Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses

sin is so powerful it reigned over all, even over those who didn’t know the law.

Genesis 5: “and he died.”

And so, death comes to reign in the earth. Rebellious, weak, ungodly people continue on in their rebellion against God until the day they die and then stand before Him to give an account for their sin. All of this began at the beginning, when our father Adam violated the commandment of God, opening the door for just a little sin, which then cracked the door open to death, who then knocked the door down and took up residence as the reigning tyrant over humanity. And death reigns over all...

“Even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam”

Adam heard directly from God, and was given a direct command. And so, Adam died for his sin, and so have all his descendants, including those who have not heard directly from God, or who have access to His Word.

This passage is helpful for us in understanding the need for global missions. Those who have not heard the Gospel, or who do not have the Scriptures, are still guilty because of the fact that Adam represented us all when he stood before God.

So, let’s take everything we just learned and make it into a few neat, and hopefully helpful statements:

Adam, whose name literally means “mankind,” was our representative before God in the garden, and represented all of humanity. Because of this, his actions affected all people who come after him.

When Adam sinned, it was just as though I personally sinned, and the guilt of Adam was carried to all of Adam’s descendants. This is what we call original sin, and that idea of original sin is where we get the idea of total depravity - in other words, sin has poisoned everything, in everyone.

Because of this sin, and the promise that God made that death would come, death entered the world through the invasion of sin, and reigned like a tyrant.

The reality and guilt of sin is not based on one’s exposure to the Law or, in our case, even the Gospel. We know this because of the universal nature of death. All die, because all sin.

From Adam to Moses, and even to Jesus, death reigned over all people, whether Jew or Greek, whether they had the Word or not.

And so, verse 14 gives us a tragic reality, that we heard already in Romans: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But now we hear that those who are in sin are under the reign of an awful tyrant: death.

We see death’s tyranny all around us. We live in the midst of a people who are terrified of death, of dying, who do everything we can to put dying out of our thoughts, and yet death still reigns over so many. The invader into God’s perfect world, death, seemed to have perfect reign over all, starting with Adam, our representative, and then poisoning every person of every generation throughout history.

Or so it thought.

“Who was a type of things to come.”

But there was another garden. One where olive trees grew, and olives were pressed together and squeezed and oil came out as the result. One where another man was tempted, with a far greater temptation than Adam experienced, and was able to resist that temptation without sin. And that same man was tried, and convicted, and crucified for sins that he didn’t commit; he took on the penalty for Adam’s children. The sin they committed placed on Him. And then, He committed His Spirit to the Father, and it looked, just for a while, like the tyrant of death would continue His reign. But then on the third day, Jesus rose from the dead, defeating the tyrant death, and securing salvation for all His people.

You see, Adam doesn’t just represent us, he points us towards the one who would perfectly represent us. Our solidarity with Adam doesn’t just condemn us, it makes salvation through the one man possible. We who were identified with the sin of Adam can now be identified in Christ. As we read through this text, Paul is setting us up to see that all of humanity has one of two representatives: either Adam, or Christ. Adam points us towards things that were to come - the day when the perfect Adam, the true and better Adam, as we sang today, would undo the effects of the curse, and conquer death, overthrowing the tyrant. If we are not identified in Adam, we cannot be identified in Christ. And so, Adam points us to the better Adam, whom we worship.

What is Romans 3:12-14 telling me to do?

Take sin seriously!

Can you see what sin desires to do! It is the warning to Cain in Genesis 4: its desire is contrary to you. All sin, every single sin, desires to distort, deceive and destroy. That is what it is built to do. Our podcast is covering the book Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices by Thomas Brooks. When we were reading it together, we read Brooks saying the most profound thing: satan, and so sin, comes in like a parasite, and then becomes a tyrant.

So, here is a fun and fascinating science fact that I was struck by today, because it serves as a profound illustration of exactly what we were talking about here. There is a parasite that some of us have heard about known as toxoplasmosis. If you or your wife has ever been pregnant, you have likely had a doctor tell you to not clean a cat litter box without gloves. Toxoplasmosis is why. it is spread from cats, because it can only reproduce in cats, because there is one specific fatty acid in the gut of a cat that it needs in order to reproduce.

Now, here is where it gets really wild. Mice are common intermediate carrier of toxoplasmosis, meaning they pick it up from the environment, and then they carry it for a time. For weeks, the mice develop zero symptoms at all. But slowly, behind the scenes, in some way that scientists aren’t exactly sure how, toxoplasmosis is at work rewiring the mouse’s brain. And do you know what it is rewiring the mouse’s brain to do? It causes a mouse to lose its fear of cats. Or any predators, really, but especially cats. The mouse’s natural reaction, to run away from their natural predatory enemy, instead becomes total inhibition, as an infected mouse will willingly jump into the mouth of a cat.

It came in as a parasite, and left as a tyrant, destroying its host in the process. And that is exactly, precisely, what our little pet sin wants to do in our lives, friends. It is only satisfied with death and misery. My addictions, whether they be drugs and alcohol, or the internet, or food, all come into our lives as parasites, seeming to do no harm, and maybe even to make things a little better for us, but if they are not killed, they will take over and ruin us. This is precisely why we quote John Owen so often: “be killing sin or sin will be killing you.”

You realize this is still the enemy strategy in your life, right? This is still how he works. Friends, please; don’t take other people’s sins more seriously than you would take your own! What must you repent of today, so that it will not kill your joy, destroy your relationships, and poison your soul?

Owen: be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.

Benediction: Romans 5:20-21

Romans 5:20–21 ESV

Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.